“Does she have any children?” I asked.
“A son.”
When I arrived in Huntington, Long Island, at the condo that Tim had bought for his mother, Aunt Charlene was crying, the kind of crying I could tell would last for years. I spent the week with her, trying to help, but the only way I could help Aunt Charlene and the Byrnes was to put their loss into words. I wrote a story for my newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, about Tim, about how he’d led his family after his father died. I still remembered his father’s funeral, when Tim shouldered more of the weight of his father’s casket, and more of the responsibility for his mother’s comfort. He’d continued in that role, helping and guiding Aunt Charlene, financially and emotionally, being the kind of son I’d strived to be. Above all he’d been a patriarch to his siblings. He’d filled in for their father, then become their father, and among the many chilling coincidences surrounding Tim’s death, the most improbable was that his father’s birthday had been September 11.
At the close of that cruel week I met up with Jimbo and we went to the memorial service for Peter. When Jimbo pulled up to my hotel I was speechless. I’d lost touch with him, as I had with everyone from Publicans, and after not seeing him for years I could barely believe his metamorphosis into a red-faced Steve Redux. He seemed, in fact, to be wrestling with where Steve’s identity ended and his began. He told me he’d already opened one bar called Dickens, which failed, and he was thinking of trying again.
Driving up to the church we talked about Steve, because the scene was so reminiscent of Steve’s funeral. Mourners converged from every direction, many more than the church could hold. I recognized dozens of faces, including one man who looked like an older version of Colt. Of course it was an older version of Colt. For some reason he was walking down the middle of the street. Jimbo and I waved, and a gray-haired Colt waved back as if in a dream.
Jimbo parked and we ran to the church. There was no point in running. Every seat was already filled, and people were spilling out of the doors. The top step of the church looked like the bar at Publicans, circa 1989—Cager, Joey D, Don. I hugged them and shook their hands. Inside we heard Peter’s father struggling through his eulogy. We stood on our toes to see. When Peter’s father became too distraught to continue, we looked away and wiped our eyes.
Afterward Jimbo and I met Steve’s widow, Georgette, at the former site of Publicans. Steve had been deeper in debt than we knew, and business had dropped off faster than we feared, but Georgette had held on longer than anyone thought she could. She tried everything, including live rock ’n’ roll bands, before finally letting the place go in 1999. Long before selling, however, she’d had to fire Uncle Charlie. He couldn’t work for anyone but Steve, she said. His flamboyant rudeness had become something else, not funny, just disagreeable.
He’d become a poor caretaker of Grandpa’s house too, worse than Grandpa. While living there alone, he’d set fire to the house by accident, or else one of his creditors had done it on purpose. I heard all kinds of rumors around town. When the fire-damaged house was sold, Uncle Charlie left New York, drifted into a restless retirement, then disappeared altogether. I suppose that in the back of my mind I always feared that Uncle Charlie might disappear, that he’d be another member of my family to make a mysterious and dramatic exit. But when it happened, when he just dropped out of sight one day, it still came as a shock.
The new owners of Publicans had renamed the place Edison’s and remodeled the barroom in dozens of subtle ways. I felt as if I were encountering an old friend who had undergone needless plastic surgery. “At least the long bar is still here,” Jimbo said, rubbing the wood.
“And the same stools,” I said.
We sat at Peter’s end, toasting his memory. I toasted with ginger ale.
“You’re not drinking?” Jimbo said.
“No.”
“Since when?”
“Ten years. Give or take.”
I didn’t go into a long explanation. I didn’t want to list all the reasons that drinking—along with smoking and gambling and most other vices—had lost its appeal after I left Publicans. I didn’t want to tell Jimbo that sobering up had felt like growing up, and vice versa. I didn’t want to say that drinking and trying felt like opposite impulses, that when I stopped the one I automatically started the other. I didn’t want to say that sometimes, late at night, remembering Steve, I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I wondered if he’d died for our sins. Had Steve lived, I’d have gone on living in his bar, and maybe a bar in Manhasset wasn’t the best place for me after all. An old-timer at Publicans used to tell me that drinking is the only thing you don’t get better at the more you do it, and when I left Publicans the sensibleness of that statement came home to me at last. I didn’t say any of this to Jimbo because I didn’t know how. I still don’t. Deciding to quit drinking was the easiest thing I ever did. Describing how I did it, and why, and whether or not I will drink again, is much harder.
But the main reason I didn’t say anything to Jimbo was that I didn’t want to profane Publicans. In the wake of September 11, I felt grateful for every minute I’d spent in that bar, even the ones I regretted. I knew this was a contradiction, but it was no less true for being so. The attacks complicated my already contradictory memories of Publicans. With public places suddenly described as soft targets, I felt only fondness for a bar that had been founded on the antiquated notion that there is safety in numbers. In my black suit, sitting amid the ruins of Publicans, I loved the old gin mill more than ever.
I asked Georgette to tell me about the last official night of Publicans. “Oh, everyone cried,” she said, especially Joey D, who was so distraught that he had to leave early. He went on to become a public-school teacher in the Bronx. Fourth grade. On his first day in class, Joey D would tell me later, he wrote his name on the blackboard, then wheeled around. “All these faces were looking at me,” he said. “And I thought, Okay, I can do this.” Icandothis. He’d spent his life staring out at a sea of thirsty faces, and now he was confronted with a wall of faces hungry for knowledge. He would make a fine teacher, I thought. The children would be fascinated by his pet mouse. And woe to any little hooligan who started a brawl on Joey D’s playground.
Fast Eddy insisted that he be the one to buy the last round at Publicans, Georgette told us. When the last glass was washed, the last cigarette extinguished, General Grant shut off the lights and locked the doors. I could picture his cigar floating through the pitch-dark barroom like the brake light of a motorcycle on a country road. I looked at the booths and stools—they were all empty, but I could hear the laughter. I could hear the voices from that last night, from every night, going back decades. I thought, We used to haunt this place, and now it will always haunt us.
Georgette ordered another glass of wine. Jimbo and I ordered cheeseburgers. They didn’t taste the same, because Fuckembabe and Smelly weren’t back there packing the patties. Fuckembabe was dead and Smelly was working at a place in Garden City. I asked about Bobo. Neither Jimbo nor Georgette knew where he’d gone or what had become of him.
Georgette asked about my mother. I told her that my mother was doing well, still living in Arizona, and though she still battled fatigue and a few other health problems, she hoped to be able to retire soon. Georgette then asked about me. What had I been doing with myself the last eleven years? I told her that in 1990, after a few months living with Jimbo in the Rocky Mountains, McGraw and I had moved to Denver. I’d gotten a job as a reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, where I spent four years learning the basics I’d lacked at the New York Times. McGraw went back to Nebraska and found work at a tiny radio station, where he conquered his stutter and discovered his calling. He always was a talker, Georgette said, smiling. A charmer, I said. A ham, Jimbo said. But now he was a star. His giggle could be heard in forty states.
In 1994 I became a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and in 1997 I was promoted to national correspondent, based in Atlanta.
From there I went to Harvard on a journalism fellowship in 2000. While at Harvard I took one more pass at the book about Publicans, which I’d decided to write as nonfiction. As always, the book eluded me. When my fellowship ended, the editors at the Times asked me to be their western correspondent, to cover the Rocky Mountain region from Denver. I’d just arrived in Denver for a visit, to see if I could picture myself living there again, when the towers were attacked.
“You can’t ever predict the future,” Georgette said in a half whisper.
I thought I could, I told her. The night I left Publicans forever, I’d boasted to Cager and Dalton and Uncle Charlie that I knew two things for sure about my future: I would never live in California or the South. When I became the southern correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, I knew that the universe had been eavesdropping on us in Publicans, and the universe had a bizarre sense of humor. Georgette smiled wistfully. True, she said.
It was getting dark. Georgette had to be getting home. Jimbo and I walked her out to the parking lot. She kissed us both and said Steve would have been proud of how we’d turned out. Stay in touch, she said.
We will, we said. We will.
I couldn’t move to Denver. Not yet. I couldn’t leave the East Coast without first writing something about my hometown and how it had been changed by the attacks. I kept my apartment at Harvard, but essentially lived in Manhasset, in a hotel outside town, and spent my days walking up and down Plandome Road, interviewing strangers, renewing old acquaintances. Most of the old gang from Publicans, I heard, gathered in a new joint on Plandome Road. I stationed myself there at happy hour and one by one they came through the door, a bit grayer, a lot sadder. I’d been reading David Copperfield again, for distraction, for comfort, and I was reminded of a line toward the end of the novel when David laments “the wandering remnants” of his surrogate childhood home.
DePietro walked in, wearing a black suit, returning from his twentieth funeral. Don, also in a black suit, said he knew a man who had attended fifty. We talked for hours, and someone at the bar described for me the way ash from the towers had floated all the way across the water. I thought of the marshy stretch of land just outside Manhasset, which Fitzgerald had dubbed the Valley of Ashes. That description now seemed a terrible prophecy.
I asked about Dalton. He and Don had dissolved their partnership, and Don was happily going it alone above Louie the Greek’s. The last Don had heard, Dalton was somewhere in Mississippi, trying to bring out a volume of his own poetry.
Cager walked in, looking exactly the same, his hair still red and still tumbling out of what appeared to be the same visor. He shook my hand and asked how I was—and if I was still going to the track. “No,” I said. “I’ve stopped doing things I suck at.”
“And yet,” he said, “you’re still a writer.” He swatted me on the back and offered to buy me a drink, and he didn’t tease me when I ordered a Coke.
We talked about the state of the world, and all the men along the bar joined in, while TV sets above the bar flashed footage of the towers burning, and of people holding photos of loved ones who were missing. I noticed how quickly every conversation hurtled back through time to the 1980s, and not simply because that was our common link. We were all masters at idealizing places, and after September 11 there was only one place left to idealize, one place that could never disillusion us. The past. Only Colt didn’t care to discuss the past, because he couldn’t remember it. “Don’t talk to me about the eighties,” he said. “I wasn’t there.”
Later that night, standing between Cager and Colt, I felt a heavy arm land on my shoulder. I turned. Bob the Cop. His hair had gone completely white and he looked exhausted. “Where are you coming from?” I asked.
“Ground zero.”
Of course.
He sat beside me and stared deep into my eyes.
“How are you?” I said.
“Twenty-five years on the force, I thought I’d seen it all.” He continued staring at me, then closed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side.
In time I worked up the courage to phone Michelle. I told her I’d heard about her husband and asked if there was anything I could do. She said she could use a drink. I drove to her parents’ house, where she and her eleven-month-old son, Matthew, had been living since the attacks. She opened the front door and looked exactly the same. Matthew, hiding behind her leg, had her big brown eyes with the spot of cinnamon in the center. He stared at me as if we knew each other, and in a way we did. He looked as if someone important had just left the room and he was wondering when that someone was coming back.
I took Michelle to dinner in Port Washington and she told me about her husband, Mike Lunden, an energy broker who loved bow ties and cigars and hockey and weddings and Chicago and fine wines—and her. She described their courtship and happy marriage. Though they lived in a studio apartment with a newborn baby, she said, they never once got sick of each other. As Michelle talked I noticed that she was yet another graduate of the Publicans Storytelling Academy. She had me laughing one minute, swallowing a lump in my throat the next.
She asked about me. Had I gotten married? I told her I’d come close once or twice, but I’d had some growing up to do first. Also, it had taken me a long time to get over my first love.
“Right,” she said. “What ever happened to—?”
“Sidney.” I cleared my throat. “She phoned me out of the blue when she heard I was at Harvard. We met for dinner.”
“And?”
“She was exactly the same.”
“And?”
“I’d changed.”
Sidney had explained, carefully and honestly, her decision not to choose me years before, saying she’d been apprehensive about a young man so enthralled by a bar. I told Michelle I thought Sidney had been right to be apprehensive.
After dinner I took Michelle for a nightcap to the site of the old Publicans. We sat in the booth nearest the door and I could see Michelle’s spirits lift, ever so slightly, as good memories drifted back. But her thoughts quickly returned to her husband. He was such a good man, she told me, repeating those words, “a good man,” several times. And he was thrilled about Matthew, she said. Now Matthew would know Mike only through letters and photos and stories. She worried about her son growing up with no father, how that void would define him. “At least he’ll have his uncles,” she said with a sigh. “And his cousins. He’s crazy about his cousins. And in school he’ll know many other children who lost fathers, so he won’t feel—different.”
I slumped against the back of the booth. It hadn’t hit me until then. Manhasset, where I’d once felt like the only boy without a father, was now a town full of fatherless children.
I’d been working on my story about Manhasset for months, shuttling back and forth between my Harvard apartment and my hotel room outside Manhasset, and my time, my editors said, was up. They needed me in Denver. I sat down and wrote at last. I wrote about the endless funerals, still taking place months later. I wrote about the mood along Plandome Road, where the bars and churches were unusually full. I wrote about the widow who couldn’t bring herself to retrieve her husband’s car from the train station. Week after week the car sat there, covered in candles and ribbons and notes of support and love. Now and then she would appear and try in vain to drive the car away, and people along Plandome Road would watch her sit behind the wheel, staring straight ahead, unable to turn the key. I wrote in a fever, a trance, about my hometown, the first time I’d experienced writing as catharsis. The words poured forth, no effort finding them. The hard part was shutting them off.
When the first draft was finished I went for a drive. I started at Memorial Field, where I sat in the sun, dizzy with nostalgia and fatigue. Staring at the baseball diamond, I remembered seeing the Dickens softball players for the first time when I was seven. I remembered all the Little League games with McGraw, and our pivotal game of catch when we were in our twenties. I snapped out of my reminiscing when four p
eople arrived to play basketball—three men my age and a boy about eleven. The boy’s eyes were large and bright, his smile crooked, and his way with the men told me he wasn’t related to any of them. They began to play two-on-two. The boy, who wore thick glasses, didn’t have many moves. But he was quick, and determined, and holding his own. The men were just out for exercise, but the boy was having an experience he’d remember forever. He might have been thinking the same thing, and so he wasn’t paying attention when one of the men threw him a no-look pass. The ball whacked the boy in the side of the face, knocking off his glasses and stopping him cold. The men ran to him. “You okay?” they said. “Fine,” the boy said, smiling shyly, rubbing the spot where the ball had left a red mark. “Aw,” one of the men said, “he’s a tough guy,” and the other men applauded, and patted him on the back, and the boy looked at them all, one by one, with such ferocious love and gratitude that I had tears in my eyes.
I got back in the car and drove to Shore Drive and looked at the water. The man who owned the most opulent waterfront house in Manhasset had been killed in the attacks. He’d phoned his wife minutes before he died, and she was said to be in seclusion inside that big Gatsbyesque palace, haunted by the sound of his voice. I followed the route my mother and I used to take in our T-Bird, from Shore Drive up Plandome Road, to Shelter Rock, and all along the way I saw American flags draped in every window, yellow ribbons tied to so many trees. I kept going, farther east, to Aunt Charlene’s, and spent the afternoon with her, drinking coffee and watching a video of Tim graduating from Syracuse.
Driving back to my hotel through the beautiful winter twilight, I listened to the radio. The local classical station was playing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” I’d always gotten emotional while listening to that piece, which Bud had introduced me to. But that night it seemed unbearably sad. I knew from Bud that “Clair de Lune” was Debussy’s musical portrait of the moon, but suddenly it seemed a song about memory, about the unearthly sound that the past makes when it drifts back to us. Hitting the scan button I came upon a man explaining how to make “the perfect cannoli.” He was funny, giving recipes in a preposterous Italian accent. I had to laugh. It was my father. We hadn’t spoken in years. I’d heard he was in New York, but I hadn’t known he was doing a cooking show on Sunday nights. I was tempted to call in, but the temptation passed. Three weeks later he died.
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 43